The invention relates to printing ribbons and particularly to endless ribbons of the type which are made of a fabric which has been impregnated with ink and stuffed into a disposable cartridge. Typically, the cartridge is adapted to be used in a dot matrix type of printer which has a drive shaft which engages a feed mechanism in the cartridge for pulling ribbon into one end of the cartridge after it has been engaged by the printer's print head. Due to space limitations, the volume of space available inside the cartridge for the stuffing of ribbon is generally quite limited and some cartridges can contain no more than about 30 feet of ribbon. For example, for one particular cartridge having a ribbon length of 32 feet, it can be calculated that about 17,400 characters can be printed for each pass of the ribbon past the print head. For a ribbon having a total ribbon life of 3 million characters, this would be about 172 passes. When the printer is printing continuously for long periods, it is obvious that the ribbon of the example could start to recycle after just 8 or 9 pages had been printed. In such a printing situation, one might notice that the characters are darker at the beginning of printing and lighter after the ribbon has been cycled once. This is a result of the fact that it takes a considerable time for ink in the ribbon to flow to a just used spot. It is known that the longer the ribbon, and thus, the longer the time available for ink to flow, the more uniform will be the density of the printed characters. The ribbon life will also be longer. Furthermore, it is known that the increase in ribbon life is not directly proportional to the increase in ribbon length since doubling the length of a ribbon should more than double the number of satisfactory characters it can print.